by Judith Tarr
Greenwood was north of Grey Horse, not far from the river. Sparrow remembered to thank the child, even as she sprang into a run.
oOo
The man was sitting with Storm, drinking herb-tea and eating berry cakes. He did not look as if war or terror had overcome him; he was a stolid person, unassuming, but something about him said that he could speak and be obeyed.
Storm greeted Sparrow politely, but she did not wander off in indirection as elders could in council. “This is Bracken, king’s heir of Greenwood. He brings word that you should hear.”
Bracken inclined his head to Sparrow with the respect that everyone showed her here; they all knew who she was. “Horsemen,” he said, as direct as Storm had been. “They’ve crossed the river west of us. We counted a hundred, riding as in a warband. Their king has yellow hair.”
Sparrow nodded. She had been expecting it. Hearing it, knowing that it had come, gave her a feeling almost of peace. “I thank you,” she said. “If I may ask . . . were there others riding near the king?”
“Kings are always well accompanied,” Bracken said solemnly. She could not tell if his eyes glinted. He did not seem the sort of man to jest on such an errand, but one never knew. “This one rode in a band within the band. All men, no women. I noticed one close by who was paler than I’ve seen before, like a bleached bone; and two together like twin falcons, keen-faced, with ruddy hair.”
“Two?” Sparrow blinked. Two of Kestrel?
No; of course not. Everyone knew how much he looked like his father. Aurochs had come, then. That was interesting in ways she would examine later, after she had spoken to this messenger.
Aurochs and Kestrel. And Walker. Of course he had come. He must need her visions sorely, as sorely as Linden needed his stallion.
Storm and the stranger were silent while Sparrow pondered. They were waiting for her to tell them what to do. It was not a weak thing; indeed it was a kind of strength. She bowed her head to it.
“If you will,” she said to Bracken, “or can, tell the tribes between here and the river to withdraw. Let them leave the way open, and clear the path for the warband.”
“I can see to that,” Bracken said.
“Good,” said Sparrow. Then to Storm she said, “I’m not commanding you. I’m asking. Are you willing to stay, to wait for them? You need not. You can go, and protect your people.”
Storm nodded slowly. “Yes, I can. Perhaps I should. But this is our place. We belong in it. We’ve camped here every summer for time out of mind.”
“These are men who live to fight,” Sparrow said.
“Such men as your Kestrel?”
“No,” said Sparrow. “Kestrel is reckoned odd and rather soft.”
Storm laughed, incredulous. “Soft? Your Sparrowhawk? He’s as hard as a flint blade. Although,” she conceded, “he has a gentle heart.”
“These men have hearts of flint,” Sparrow said. “They kill for joy.”
“And you will face them.” Storm sighed, and shrugged a little. “We fight better than maybe you think. And maybe there will be no need to fight. We’ll stay.”
oOo
She was not to be moved. She saw Bracken tended, fed, and given a fresh horse. She would have been glad to offer him a bed for the night, but he would not stay. “I’ve messages to run,” he said, “and tribes to visit. Best I begin now.”
There were preparations to make. The people had to be told, and offered the choice: to retreat to a more distant camp, or to stay.
Nearly all of them elected to stay. The ill, the old, those who feared for their children, took horses and oxen and a strong store of provisions and rode away south and eastward. The rest, men and women both, brought out weapons Sparrow had not known they had: short bows but strong, for shooting from horseback; spears of fire-hardened wood, sharpened or else tipped with flint; quivers full of arrows. They had knives and clubs and darts. They were well equipped to face a war.
“Raiders come,” Storm said, “and not all of them on two feet. Wolves in winter, too, and lions, and once a herd of aurochs. Their bull had a taste for manflesh.”
Sparrow was properly humbled. She had been thinking of these people as strangers to war. But peace was a choice they made. They would fight if so compelled.
oOo
Keen had not gone away to the safer camp. Sparrow tried to persuade her, but she refused to go. “Rain is staying,” she said. “She’s Summer’s milk-mother. Summer is much too young yet to wean.”
No matter that one of the other women would have been pleased to take Summer to her breast. Keen was adamant. “When Walker sees Summer,” Sparrow warned her, “he’ll want him. And if he sees what is between you and Cloud—”
Keen paled, but she would not give in. “You’ll look after them,” she said, “whatever happens to me.”
“I’d rather look after you,” Sparrow said, but the battle was over. Keen stayed.
And they waited. Bracken’s people sent word of the horsemen’s passage. It was not as swift as Sparrow might have expected. They were advancing warily.
Sparrow wondered if that was Kestrel’s doing, or Walker’s. Linden must be fretting endlessly at the delay. But someone among his advisors was counseling caution—as if this were war indeed, and they could expect an army to fall upon them.
She hoped that they were growing more unhappy rather than less, the farther they rode, and the emptier the land was. Complacency might serve her purpose, but mounting fear of the unseen would serve it best.
50
Walker counseled caution in the warband’s passage through the southlands. Linden would have ridden straight on, but when scouts brought word of camps discovered but empty of people, Walker insisted that they stop at each one. Some had been abandoned as recently as a day or two before, but they never found the inhabitants, even when they sent bands of riders to track the tribes. Half a day or a day away from the camp, the trail invariably vanished, or proved to be false.
“They know we’re coming,” Walker said by the king’s fire at night. He could not sit still; he paced and fretted, as restless as everyone would have expected Linden to be. But Linden, apart from an expressed and rather obvious desire for a woman, was at ease.
“What makes you think they’re expecting us?” he asked.
Walker looked as if he would burst out in words of unfortunate consequence, but he had a little self-control left. He answered with tight-drawn patience, “People don’t just walk away from camps in summer, not without cause. We are that cause. They’ve seen us. They’re running away from us.”
“Pity,” drawled Curlew from the depths of a skin of kumiss. “The king’s not the only one who’d be glad of a woman. Or a nice side of beef, either. I’d be glad to raid some southlander’s cattle, take his daughter, take a fat heifer, have myself a feast.”
The king’s companions sighed at that. “Kestrel,” said the king, “do you think they’ll run, too—the ones we’re hunting?”
Kestrel began to regret that he had taken a place at the king’s fire. He should have spread his lionskin on the camp’s edge and gone undisturbed to sleep. But he had had a desire for kumiss and a hunger for the gazelle that roasted over the fire.
Linden wanted an answer to his question. Kestrel gave it unwillingly but honestly enough. “I can’t tell you. They’re not warriors, I know that. They see no dishonor in flight, if it keeps the children safe.”
“Weaklings,” Linden said. “If they run, you’ll track them. You found them before. You can do it again.”
“They found me,” Kestrel said. “I was half-dead on a riverbank.”
“You’ll find them,” Linden said.
It was lightly spoken, but Kestrel heard the growl beneath. The king had laid a command on him—the same as before, but stronger now, because Linden would ride wherever he rode. This time he could not escape his duty.
oOo
Kestrel escaped soon after that. Walker was still pacing and snarling. For all that it was his caution
that had slowed their advance, he was aquiver with impatience.
He was in rather a terrible state, Kestrel thought. Was it just that he was blind to visions, and must have his sister’s eyes to see them? Or was there something else that drove him to distraction?
Kestrel was not particularly inclined, tonight, to concern himself with Walker’s anxieties. He had enough of his own.
Aurochs was asleep near where Kestrel had in mind to spread his own bed. Kestrel unrolled the lionskin at arm’s length from his father and smoothed it on the flattened grass. He lay on it, yawning hugely, stretching till he felt the pull in his scarred ribs.
Sleep eluded him. People had begun to sing by the fire. After a while he saw Linden leave it and walk not far from him, pausing just within sight. A second figure crept from the camp to join him: from voice and movement, one of the younger men of the Red Deer, so young his beard was barely sprouted. He had a face as pretty as a girl’s, and a girl’s giggle, too. The two of them went down in the grass, taking such comfort as warriors would take on the march when women were far away.
Kestrel sighed inaudibly and rolled onto his belly, head on folded arms. He did not need a girlish boy to ease his discomfort. What he needed was close now, so close that when he closed his eyes he could see her. But whether she would want to see him ever again—that, he did not know. He could only pray. And hope that, somehow, she would forgive him.
The two in the grass were noisy enough to wake the dead. It amazed him that his father slept through it. When at last they were done, Linden left the boy panting and still giggling, and walked quickly back toward the camp.
He paused by Kestrel. Kestrel considered feigning sleep, but Linden seemed determined to wait him out.
He opened his eyes. There was just enough firelight, at this distance, to see the king’s face. It was a little slack with satisfaction, its smile lazy. “He’ll go another round if you’ve a mind. My taste is for finer meat, or I’d have stayed.”
“I have no taste for such meat at all,” said Kestrel.
Linden dropped down beside him. “Truly? I’ve heard some say you must prefer men, since you’re so seldom seen with women. Though from what Fawn was saying after you had her that night . . .” His voice trailed off. Fawn, as he must have remembered, was dead, buried with his father. He shrugged, sighed. “Is it true, what Walker said? Did you lie with his sister?”
Kestrel would not lie to this man, whom in his fashion he trusted. “Yes,” he said.
“Did you lie with her in the south? Was that why you took so long to come back?”
Far too often, Kestrel thought, one did underestimate this man. Quick he was not. Stupid? Not in certain ways. When it came to the ways of men with women, Linden was not stupid at all. “Yes,” he said again.
“I thought so,” Linden said without anger. “You know, I never noticed her, except that she was different—little and dark. People said her mother was a witch. Did she turn out beautiful?”
“Not particularly,” Kestrel said. “Not to most eyes.”
“But you think she is.”
“Her spirit is a white fire,” Kestrel said. “She really is a shaman. Far more of one than her brother ever was or could hope to be.”
“A woman can’t be a shaman,” Linden said.
“In the south she can be.”
“That’s hard to believe,” said Linden.
“Believe it,” Kestrel said.
He thought Linden might leave then, but the king stayed. “Walker says that I should kill you once we find the stallion. You betrayed us, he says. You’re leading us into a trap.”
“Do you think that?” asked Kestrel.
Linden lifted a shoulder. “I think it’s strange that this country is empty. We could be going to an ambush. But we’re strong. We’ll fight our way out if we have to.”
“Will you kill me if it is an ambush?”
“Yes,” Linden said. “I’ll hate to do it. I like you, Sparrowhawk. You always tell me the truth. And you never treat me like a fool.”
“I don’t think you are a fool,” said Kestrel. “You could be a better king, but I’ve heard of worse. You’ve the wits to let others rule where it’s sensible, and you keep the women happy; and the young warriors love you. Nobody loved the old king. Only you and Drinks-the-Wind mourned him when he died.”
“My father was a good king,” Linden said. “Tell me. Did Walker kill him?”
Kestrel’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”
“I told him,” Aurochs said.
Kestrel started half out of his skin. His father was awake, had perhaps been awake from the beginning. He lay on his side, eyes open and clear of sleep.
“Did Walker kill him?” Linden pressed.
“Yes,” Kestrel said. “He did. Sparrow saw it—she was watching. And Spearhead who is dead. He used a dart to sting the horse.”
“Do you think he’ll do something to me?”
Linden did not sound afraid. Kestrel, who had been thinking such thoughts for a long while, was taken off guard, so that he could not for a while think of anything sensible to say.
It was Aurochs who said, “I am thinking that it is near midsummer, and in the old time they sacrificed the king on the Stallion’s day—the third day, the day of the greatest sacrifice. I am also thinking that Walker bade the shamans bring all the tribes to the river after the gathering. He’ll be making a new king there, if I’m not mistaken.”
Kestrel shook his head to clear it of fogs that had been filling it since he came back to the People. “Of course. That’s what he’s up to. But he can’t kill Linden out here. He’ll want to do it where the tribes can see.”
“The warband would do,” Aurochs said.
“But first he has to have the stallion.” Kestrel frowned, pondering that. “It’s too close to midsummer. We won’t find the Grey Horse before then, not if they’re camped where I think they are—and supposing they stay there and don’t vanish into the hills and woodlands.”
“Midsummer this year is mid-moon,” Aurochs said. “It’s not the time of power that the new moon would be—and Walker is a new-moon shaman. Would you like to wager that he’ll push to find the stallion before the new moon, and ordain that the sacrifice be then and not on the day of midsummer?”
Kestrel’s belly tightened. “Yes. Yes, that’s when he’ll do it, if he does it. Then take the king’s head and the stallion’s head back to the river, and raise up a new king there. But how is he going to make the royal mares accept a stallion for his new king to ride?”
“Simple enough,” said Aurochs. “He’ll name a new royal herd, and have the old one sacrificed. A great sacrifice, a mighty holocaust before the gods.”
“The People would never allow that,” Kestrel said, appalled.
“They would if he declared that the royal herd was a deception, a plot on the part of the southern witches, and cited as proof that these witches are Grey Horse People. If their women took the shape of mares and came to deceive us, and in the fullness of time stole away our kingship through our stallion—who’d not believe that?”
“I would not,” Kestrel said. “No Grey Horse woman would do such a thing, even if she could. What would she know of the People, or care?”
“My son,” said Aurochs dryly, “the People are the world’s heart and center, its divine rulers. How could anyone, even a southern tribe, fail to acknowledge their power?”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Kestrel.
“To you it is.”
Linden said, “That’s not true, is it? About the witches? Because if it is—”
“Believe me,” Kestrel said, “the Grey Horse had never heard of White Stone until I came there, and it has no care at all for our kings or our troubles, except when we force them upon it. Anything the royal herd is or does is Horse Goddess’ doing. No mortal man or woman has a part in it except by her will.”
“But those are Horse Goddess’ children,” Linden said. “You’ve told
us so.”
Aurochs spoke before Kestrel could, in his quiet voice. “Believe this, my lord. Walker lies as he breathes, for his very life. And he’ll destroy yours to feed his power.”
“Then what do we do?” Linden asked. He was afraid, maybe. Maybe he was only confused. But he believed—and that was what mattered.
“I think,” said Kestrel, since Aurochs’ glance passed the question to him, “that we need to watch and wait. And decide whom we can trust. Keep the companions by you always, my lord.”
“We should tell them,” said Linden.
Kestrel nodded. “I think so. They’re to be trusted. Some of the warband, too. Not the men of the Red Deer. I think they’re his. I think Tall Grass is serving him in the gathering while Red Deer serves him here. And . . .” He hesitated. “I think . . . my lord, would you be willing to make alliance with the Grey Horse?”
“We’re going to raid them,” Linden said in surprise, “and steal back my stallion.”
“We may not need to raid,” said Kestrel. “If they’re ready for us, and I think they are, they won’t attack us before we attack them. We can ride in as guests.”
“I don’t know,” Linden said. “The men are expecting a fight. They won’t like this.”
“Tell them,” said Kestrel, “that Grey Horse women are as free as men, and that if a man asks, and asks politely, a woman will happily lie with him. But he must ask—he can’t take.”
Linden’s eyes gleamed even in the near-dark. “Really? They really will?”
“Truly,” said Kestrel. “Their younger shaman, who is a woman, came to me and lay with me, bold as a man, and skilled—my lord, you never knew such skill.”
“Gods,” breathed Linden. “Do you think—would she—?”
“She would like you very much,” said Kestrel. “And she would find you quite amazingly beautiful.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Like a fine bay mare,” Kestrel said.
“Ah,” said Linden. He rose as if in a dream and wandered back to his fire and his companions.
There was a pause. Kestrel could feel his father’s amusement. “That,” said Aurochs at length, “was divinely inspired. Did you just think of it?”
